The present invention relates to printers and more specifically to high speed dot printers.
Presently dot printers exist as dot matrix printers which take the form of a print head having a number of print pins arranged in rows and columns and the pins are individually actuated in combinations in a manner well known in the art to print characters as the print head is moved across a piece of paper or other material upon which it is desired to print the characters. Another form of a dot printer is the ink jet printer which uses a number of individual ink jets out of which droplets of ink are pulsed in combinations to print characters as a sequence of dots in a manner well known in the art. However, ink jet printers require a lot of maintenance and are relatively messy to maintain since the ink jets need frequent periodic cleaning and other than periodic cleaning as the ink jets often clog up. These two types of dot printers yield printing speeds faster than other mechanical printers such as the conventional typewriter or the daisy wheel printer to meet the need in the art for high speed printers but the print resolution or quality of existing dot printers is inferior to the resolution or quality of print obtained from typewriters and daisy wheel printers. This is due to the fact that the dots making up characters are discrete unconnected dots and thereby yield low print resolution. In addition, due primarily to this low print resolution the ability to provide variable print fonts is greatly limited. This has greatly limited the applications of dot printers. Business letters and other documents requiring high resolution characters cannot be printed on dot printers and must be printed on other printers such as the typewriter and the daisy wheel printer, both of which print at much lower speeds than the dot printers. Accordingly, in most computer and many other computer based equipment installations at least two printers are often provided. A high speed dot printer and a lower speed printer such as a daisy wheel printer are provided, one to provide printed outputs requiring high resolution and the other printer to provide high print speed outputs. Having two printers has shortcomings such as introducing extra system installation costs and extra maintenance costs.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a printer that can print at speeds faster than typewriters and daisy wheel printers while providing high print resolution. There is also a need in the art for a printer that can print at the high speed of a dot matrix printer while providing greater print resolution than heretofore possible with dot printers. There is also a need in the art for a single printer that can provide high speed printing equivalent to existing dot matrix printers when desired, and that can provide high resolution printing when required but at higher speeds not provided by prior art equipment.